"If I had to write this paper, this is what I would write."

John McCarthy 10/24/2011
Douglas Engelbart 7/2/2013
Marvin Minsky 1/24/2016
Wes Clark 2/22/2016
Seymour Papert 7/31/2016
Jay Forrester 11/16/2016
Bob Taylor 4/13/2017
Chuck Thacker 6/12/2017
Larry Roberts 12/26/2018
Fernando Corbató 7/12/2019
Larry Tesler 2/17/2020
Bert Sutherland 2/18/2020

That ARPA/IPTO funding in the 60s was some good shit.

@mgreeley Eames' "Mathematica" exhibit from 1961. There are three today, in Boston, Queens, and Detroit.

a 1994 film about Misha Mahowald
youtube.com/watch?v=lwT1jU…
ini.uzh.ch/~tobi/papers/m…

archive.org/details/bitsav…

@ivanhzhao @ccorcos It's striking (heartbreaking?) to compare the focus and concerns in the Obj-C HOPL paper to those in the Smalltalk one. Cox and Kay live on different planets. worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk

@andy_matuschak I did busk occasionally with the melodica on Telegraph Ave

@joannekcheung

Brillouin, 1942

Asim Barut on non-perturbative QED / Conal Elliott on non-monadic IO

@AndJohnsonAnd @Conaw @r0k_life @sritchie "Explorable explanations" are not pedagogical.

@sjsyrek @smdiehl If you have an open-minded definition of "programming", "Exploring ODEs" by Trefethen and co came out in 2018, and it's nothing short of a masterpiece. It's basically a playable book! tobydriscoll.net/project/explode

@pchiusano I think the binary coders also rejected asm because it required much more CPU time (= $$) and more card passes (submit an asm card deck, get back a machine code deck, then resubmit that!). For compilation to make sense, the *entire physical environment* had to change. 1/

@pchiusano Genuinely transformative ideas initially tend to be awkward and impractical -- before they reshape the environment around them. It may be less that the experts are hardheaded and more that they care about getting something done "today", so they take the environment as given. 2/

@pchiusano Which is to say, the experts may be making perfectly correct decisions with respect to getting short-term results, while simultaneously being a huge drag on long-term progress. Often, their explicit responsibility is to the former, not the latter. 3/

@tophtucker @BW youtube.com/watch?v=zncGMr7ggmM

@tophtucker @BW wait, sometimes I forget that instead of showing dumb mockups I can show the actual thing @glench @rmozone